end of august, one way of reviving contact with JPCS. Need a venue for
a seminar for the gathering of all of these people. Leni Padero,
Sir Olpoc’s contact. She’s looking for a venue
for a Sunday – the last Sunday of August. Pass it on the students.

Considering that I tend to text long messages in bursts, it might
actually make more sense for me to stay at a cybercafe and IM friends.
Well, at least, it _would_ make more sense if my friends were always
online. They aren’t, so I’m stuck with text messaging. Come to think
of it, Bluetooth or IR communication through my phone would be
wonderful, as then I wouldn’t have to lift my fingers off the
keyboard… IR seems like a better bet for now, as my smartphone
doesn’t have Bluetooth. I need to get an IR dongle that works with Linux.

Holding up. Doing remarkably well, in fact – probably because I’m too
busy to do anything else. The sheer magnitude of my task and the
inadequacy of my preparation is starting to sink in. There’s no way
that 4 years of college could have prepared me for teaching!
It’s harder than most people think. What other profession expects you
to manage people from day 1?

I think I’ve a way to deal with my large CS123 class: topic experts.
Each group has experts in charge of mastering and teaching particular
topics. For example, we’ve assigned pattern experts and C++ experts.
This way, I can do study groups. We’ll meet every week. I’ll give them
assignments, and they’ll share what they learned with their
classmates.

Decision: One person per role. The topic expert is forced to pay
attention, otherwise the whole group will have problems. The topic
expert also learns to teach others. Different areas of expertise
ensure division of work.

I’m going to try to move my plans up by a year. I suspect I’ll learn
more by going to graduate school full-time than I’ll learn from
modifying the courses. I need process. I need a way to measure
the effects of the changes we make. I need a way to describe the
changes in the first place! I guess I still see myself as more into
computer science education…

Is that because I’m afraid of hardware? Is that because I don’t
yet have some radical idea for an alternative user interface design?
But I don’t need radical ideas to get started. I can get into wearable
computing the open source way; small, incremental improvements. I can
focus on the everyday. I can start off by capturing sound. I can try
to figure out how to Morse text messages. (Maybe I can do that as part
of the Java wireless center thing!) What if my phone was my wearable
user interface? Wearable computing’s not scary. I can do this.